Undercity Killer Writing Notes 1

I’m really struggling to finish out a novella I’ve been working on called UNDERCITY KILLER. I have 3.5 chapters until I’m done with the first draft, and then I can finally share it and get some feedback. But I just can’t get myself to be consistent. I lost all my momentum since I kept spending too much time plugging the chapters into chatgpt to fix my phrasing problems. I used to think it was giving me motivation by giving me something more polished, but now I realize it was just a distraction sucking up my creative energy that should have been going straight into the story in the first place. Maybe even now I’m wasting good energy by directing it at a stupid blog rather than getting the draft done.

UNDERCITY KILLER is a novella following a young contract killer named Thain - he operates in a cyberpunk city ravaged with corruption, working for a monopoly that targets resistances and opposition in order to uphold their perfect image… that is, until the monopoly begins to fracture and leaders begin targeting each other.

The story was originally inspired by a series of music videos by Freddie Dredd - his VENGEANCE TRILOGY. They’re dark, gritty and crude clay-mation videos that made me want to make a cyberpunk-based story rooted in betrayal, led by a bloodthirsty protagonist.

Telling stories from the perspective of a killer is something that fascinates me more than most things. Maybe it’s just a phase, but I’ve made at least two major scripts / manuscripts along those lines. Maybe it’ll be my trademark, or maybe that’ll get boring.

I’m worried the plot is too riddled with betrayals and deaths. There are many characters that are introduced and then killed off in that same chapter, and there are very few characters that are 100% loyal to their cause. I wonder if expanding it to further flesh out these characters would be at all beneficial to the story or just bog it down. Or maybe the spontaneity would reinforce the undertones of insignificance and impermanence. That’ll definitely be something I ask my proofreaders.

Something else I’ve considered it turning the novella into a screenplay. Only then, I’d definitely be worried about originality and blatant stealing from other movies and books - it’s very, very Blade Runner. Maybe once it’s all buttoned up I’ll decide, it just needs to be a novella first.

Man, I just need to be done with that stupid draft.